Imagine! I have simply never met a person, not a
Guy fell in step beside the other. He said, “I understand a few of your people get to Earth as diplomatic personnel, and a few more go out on trade missions.”
“Oh yes, but that’s women’s work, of course. Goodness, I wouldn’t dream of being so effeminate as to forget my place and…”
Guy looked at him.
“What’s the matter, darling?” Podner said. They had reached a door in the hallway on the second floor. The Amazonian bachelor began to push it open.
When they got into the small living room, before looking around, Guy said, “Look. I’ll make this brief, but I’d like to try to make it stick. The next person, man, woman or child that makes another crack suggesting I’m effeminate, I’m going to award a very fat lip!”
His guide was taken aback. “A very fat lip?” he wavered.
“A bust in the mouth.”
“Oh, dear, you’re so unmanly.”
Guy Thomas closed his eyes. “I give up,” he muttered.
He looked about the room. It was furnished approximately as he would have expected an apartment hotel for bachelor women to be furnished back on Earth. Comfortable enough, but by no stretch of earthside imagination could it have been called a man’s quarters. He shrugged resignation, and walked into the bedroom, which was even more in the way of frills and lace, and then stuck his head into the refresher room.
“How do you like it?” Podner gushed. “I’m truly sorry we couldn’t have done better, but the sanctuary is literally overflowing. It’s all a boy can do to be out on the streets these days. I do hope that the new raids on the Lybians will release some of the pressure on we bachelor types.” He giggled. “It is sort of fun, though. You know what I mean, being so much in…” he giggled again “…
“It’s fine,” Guy said. “The suite, I mean, not being pursued by bands of panting women. And now, if you don’t mind, I have to see the Hippolyte tomorrow, whoever the Hippolyte is. Which reminds me. Who, or what, is an Hippolyte?”
“But the major told you, darling.”
Guy looked at him.
Podner said, “Oh, you know. I’m not really superstitious myself, but I do think all these old traditions and all are really very sweet, don’t you?”
“What’s the Hippolyte?”
“My dear boy, Hippolyte of the Golden Girdle of Ares. Hippolyte of the famous battle axe. The queen of the Amazons, who was betrayed by Heracles.”
Some of it vaguely came back to Guy Thomas from high school mythology. “What’s all that got to do with here and now?”
“Oh now, really, darling. Is it different on other planets? So many of the traditions of antiquity are called upon today, simply for the sake of, why, oh dear, I don’t know. It’s always been so. Remember how in your own Earth history that the name of Caesar and the title of Imperator was used for a thousand and more years after Julius himself died? The German Kaiser, the Russian Czar, the British Emperor Rex.”
Guy said, “So the present government of, uh, Paphlagonia has a queen they call Hippolyte. And she’s supposed to be a reincarnation of the last Hippolyte, and she of the one before. And, I suppose, all the way back to the mythological Hippolyte who had her belt swiped by Heracles as one of his twelve labors.”
Podner giggled. “You make it sound so silly.” He fluttered a hand. “But I suppose that’s about it. Actually, of course, when the Hippolyte dies, a new one is elected by representatives from each of the families.”
“Families?”
Podner looked at him archly. “Oh, not families in the usual sense. From the clans, darling. The
Guy Thomas was out of his depth. “All right,” he said. “So tomorrow I’m to meet the chief of state and her council.”
“Good heavens, how exciting. Men so seldom have the opportunity to even see the Hippolyte, not to speak of
“I hope not,” Guy muttered. “But look, I’ve got to go to bed. Is there anything else?”
“Oh dear no,” Podner fluttered. “Do forgive me for keeping you up so long. When you wish breakfast, just switch on the orderbox and call for it. And now, do get your beauty sleep.”
“Goodnight,” Guy said.
When the other was gone, he stood for a long moment in the center of the living room, in thought. He let his eyes go around the apartment. After a time he went to the door and threw the lock. It looked adequate.
He went to the window then, opened it and looked out. It faced on the garden, which completely surrounded the building. He could see down the boulevard, toward the center of town. There was a statue in a plaza not two blocks away. They hadn’t passed it in the hovercar on the way in from the spaceport. A woman, what seemed to be a quiver of arrows on her back, her hand resting on some sort of animal. A dog? No, it looked more like a deer. It came to him. A colossal statue of Diana the Huntress. He sought through his memory and nodded. He knew where he was in the city of Themiscyra.
He closed the window. There was a knob to polarize the window glass. He turned it.
He stood in the center of the room again, looking about. Finally he pulled the ring from his finger, took it in his left hand and with the nail of his little finger, activated it by flicking an all but microscopic stud.
He started at the orderbox and the vizo-phone on the table near the bed, passing the ring over and about, slowly, carefully. There was no reaction. Slowly then, he went about the rest of the room, over each piece of furniture, over each decorative device, up and down the walls. And then into the refresher room.
It took him a full half hour. Finally he nodded. The room was either not bugged, or if it was, the device was so sophisticated that his equipment couldn’t detect it. He deactivated his sweeper ring, put it back on his finger, and took up the tool kit which Clete had examined so thoroughly on the
He pulled out the cutter drill and twisted it expertly. It fell apart into three separate pieces. He laid the pistol grip to one side and picked up another of the tools. This twisted apart as well, this time into two units. He took one of them and attached it to the pistol grip. Still a third tool divided under his fingers. He added a part of it to the pistol grip which was metamorphosing into an entirely different device from that which it had started out.
He looked at it thoughtfully, reached down into the kit and came up with a medium sized capsule. He slugged it home into the butt, threw the charge lever and then the safety. He stuck the gun into his tunic and under the belt which held his flowing garment together.
He looked around the room again, as though checking, shook his head and returned the various tools which he had strewn about the table to the tool kit and put it into a closet. He turned the lights out and stepped to the windows and threw them open.
The nearest light of any brilliance at all was over on the boulevard. Occasionally a hovercar passed, but there were no pedestrians in sight for the moment. It was getting late.
He swung a leg over the window ledge, lowered himself carefully. His toes, mountain-climber educated, sought proturberances and found them. He had noted earlier that the decorative motif of the building allowed ample scope for the educated climber. He slowly worked his way down the wall to the garden.
He stood there for a long moment, listening. There was nothing.
He made his way over to the boulevard and openly strode along it. He walked the better part of a kilometer, stopped for awhile, scowling, at a crossroad, then decided and turned right. The street was narrower here. Narrower and darker. Evidently, the Amazonians had no particular reason to over-illuminate their capital city during the night hours.
He walked somewhat more rapidly now. He had not wanted to attract what little traffic there had been on the boulevard by a hurried pace. This was different.
Twenty minutes later, he paused again, then turned to his left, down a way that could have been described more as an alley than a street. It was darker still, but his eyes were used to the dim now.
